Associated PressLos Angeles Lakers GM Rob Pelinka hugs LeBron James after the Lakers defeated the Miami Heat 106-93 in Game 6 of the NBA Finals on Oct. 11 in Lake Buena Vista, Fla.

It’s Thanksgiving.

Also, it’s a year sports were taken from us for a long stretch, putting the Stanley Cup, Larry O’Brien Trophy and that circular trophy with the flags on it they give to the World Series victor at risk of being given to nobody.

Did you know they call that thing The Commissioners Trophy?

Larry O’Brien did some good things as NBA commissioner back in the day, but he was no David Stern. Still, even putting the wrong guy’s name on the gold, basketball’s ultimate trophy sounds so much better than what they hand out on the diamond.

It’s amazing how baseball flourishes despite itself. Well, that is, if you can call financial success amidst all the striking out and starting pitchers who can’t go deep into games flourishing.

But I digress.

Where were we?

Yes, Thanksgiving.

As I meant to say — write? — it’s been a difficult year, perhaps the worst of our lifetimes. Nonetheless, even in these challenged coronavirus times, sports offers much for which to be thankful.

I’m sure of it.

So here we go.

• Just five major league baseball teams — Arizona, Texas, Miami, Toronto, Tampa Bay — play on artificial surfaces and only two, the Blue Jays and Rays, play on surfaces so clearly artificial it hardly looks like baseball, the way it hardly looked like baseball in Cincinnati, St. Louis, Montreal, Kansas City, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Houston, Toronto, Minnesota and Seattle when so many of us were growing up.

• At least one major sport — basketball — enjoys absolute labor peace between players and ownership and it’s the same sport that’s embraced the activism of its players like no other; meanwhile others, all the way down to NASCAR, have taken steps.

• Despite the striking out, pitchers who can’t go deep and hitters who refuse to adjust to defensive shifts begging them to go the other way, you can still find amazing glove-work from the likes Nolan Arenado, Francisco Lindor, Javier Baez, Mookie Betts, Mike Trout, Matt Chapman and others whose names escape because who can absorb baseball in their 50s the way they devoured it as a teenager? But no matter how you watch it, the artistry remains. Defensive diamond highlights remain sports’ best highlights.

• Though Doc Emrick has retired as hockey’s best voice, Al Michaels still calls football, Jon Miller still calls baseball, so does Bob Uecker and Joe Buck; Kevin Harlan still calls football and basketball, Bob Costas still cameos for MLB Network, Mike Tirico calls everything, even hockey and Vin Scully, though retired, remains with us and has a Twitter account, too.

• If you can find your way to YouTube, you can witness and be moved by pretty much anything all over again, like Secretariat at the Belmont, Zenyatta at the Breeders’ Cup Classic, Affirmed and Alydar in the Derby, Preakness and Belmont and that’s just horse racing. You can watch Game 5 of the 1976 NBA Finals, the Greatest Game Ever Played; or the night Magic and Bird first met, one a Spartan, the other a Sycamore. You can watch Ali knock out Liston (twice), Foreman and Frazier, too, when Smokin’ Joe remained in his corner; you can watch Kirk Gibson, Hank Aaron, Bobby Thompson or Bill Mazeroski hit some pretty famous home runs. It’s all there waiting for you.

• Fenway, Wrigley Field and Dodger Stadium are still in use. So is Lambeau Field and Madison Square Garden. And pretty much everything built since Camden Yards is pretty great, too.

• Federer, Nadal and Djokovic continue to battle. So does Serena.

• Bryson DeChambeau can’t win them all, or even most. Indeed, you probably missed his finishing 18 strokes back at the Masters because, you know, he finished 18 strokes back at the Masters. And if you want to forget they played the Masters in November because that’s just not right, it’s actually quite easy to forget because Dustin Johnson won.

• That a team like the Denver Nuggets can get as far as it did and a team like the Miami Heat can get even further in an age of unprecedented superstar movement and not to those teams, unless you want to count Jimmy Butler, who nobody was counting until the Heat wound up in the NBA Finals.

• Kim Ng, a woman, hired by Derek Jeter, is the new general manager of the Florida Marlins and it even happened quietly. It shouldn’t be too long, either, before a woman is directing men on an NBA court. Seriously.

• Stephen A. Smith, Skip Bayless and all of their imitators, who for the last 20 years have become the worst thing about sports, are wrong all the time.

• If nostalgia isn’t your thing, if it’s no good unless you’re seeing it for the first time, there are so many channels to choose from, you can find something dramatic and interesting just about all the time, be it Tulsa winning another football game out of nowhere on a Thursday; an MLS contest that makes you realize, yeah, soccer’s a thing in America, too; or volleyball from the Big 12, SEC, ACC or Big 10, any of the conferences that gets almost everything televised, that makes you stop and think, holy cow, the athleticism.

• All that, and some of us get to write about it and it’s never felt like work. One hopes the reading experience is something to be thankful for, too.

Happy Thanksgiving.